Nissan Frontier 3.8L V6 teardown

[Exhaustgases]

Yeah engineering at its best.

 

[D60]

In a design like that, how would you know the water pump is on its way out? No weep hole and no warning.

Again, just like the Ford 3.5 you need to 1) be aware of external leaks) and 2) check your oil regularly to look for a milkshake on the dipstick. If caught early a milkshake is not a death sentence, depending on a few factors.

I continue to maintain this is why engines like the Hurricane and some BMW/Mini -- and whatever else -- that are deleting engine oil dipsticks are dumb. There's always a segment of the internet (cough, trolls, cough!) that will just shout me down as a Luddite and resistant to change.....but dipsticks make for an easy, cursory health scan of both engines and automatic transmissions.

And yes, there are absolutely people who have found a milkshake in transverse Ford 3.5s who just replaced the water pump, cleaned it up and continued on. Did it reduce life expectancy? Probably, but the vehicle can still be serviceable for a long while.

 

[SC Maintenance]

It has weep holes that drain to the exterior side of the block. The video does not really go into much detail of who the end user was but the evidence was there that maintenance was neglected and even if there was indications there was coolant coming out the weep holes it was ignored.

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Thanks for sharing. Its good to see there are at least weep holes to pay attention to.

Its unfortunate they turned a 3 hour job into a 10 hour job, but that is what it is I guess. So $3K for a water pump still < new engine if you pay attention.

 

[rodinator1234]

I think these are generally good engines. I watched this video as well, it proves you can not out engineer everyone. If someone ignores general maintenance...anything can and will fail.